Modified On January 4, 2008
Pudgy, the Chicago comedian who was a fixture in Las Vegas casinos, has died.
We met Pudgy once, in March of 1995. We were in Las Vegas, as the creative team for The John DeBella Show, broadcasting a week of shows from the Hard Rock Casino Hotel. It fell to us to find out which comedians were in town and try to book them as guests on the show.
Pudgy was the comedian on the Crazy Girls show at the Riviera at the time. She appeared as a guest on the radio show and her interview was one of the highlights of the week. She graciously invited us to catch one of her Crazy Girls performances. We took her up on the invite.
It was her job to open the show and play off that embarrassment the permeated the room as 300 or so mostly males waited in the dark for “Las Vegas’ Sexiest Topless Revue” to begin.
Pudgy dealt with it by further embarrassing those males. And she did it well. She was the female authority figure, constantly re-appearing amid the pulchritude, to shame the boys for being the pigs they were. It’s an odd dynamic, but it worked.
The “Queen of Tease,” variously described as an insult comic or “the female Don Rickles,” Beverly Wines Cardella started out in Chicago and ended in Vegas. She was the emcee on the X Burlesque show at the Flamingo when she died at her home of a heart attack on Christmas eve, according to LVR-J columnist Norm Clarke. Read his obit here.